


bury a friend

by Ejunkiet



Series: pearls and monopoly money [4]
Category: Good Girls (TV)
Genre: Bridges the gap between s2 and s3, F/M, Rio is angry and healing, Rio's perspective, a dark introspective of sorts, but he still dreams of her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:55:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26442298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ejunkiet/pseuds/Ejunkiet
Summary: By all rights, he's a dead man walking.Ten hours, they had him in surgery. From the look of his chart, he'd flatlined twice, and he can feel the consequences of that, see it in the bruises on his chest, the exhaustion lining the faces of his family. He'd woken to a little hand in his, Pop's cheeks damp with tears, and shit, it'd been close. Too close.
Relationships: Beth Boland/Rio
Series: pearls and monopoly money [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1294202
Comments: 10
Kudos: 44





	bury a friend

**Author's Note:**

> Rio's POV, or rather, an alternate take on what happens after season two.
> 
> This has been sitting in my drafts too long! I actually started this in the between season gap, before we had confirmation that Rio was coming back (but of course he was, I mean-).

When he wakes, he's in a hospital bed, his mouth is dry as bone and he can taste blood, stale and metallic, on his tongue. The pain in his chest has been dulled by the drugs, but it still lingers, a persistent ache that spikes with every breath.

By all rights, he's a dead man walking. 

Ten hours, they had him in surgery. From the look of his chart, he'd flatlined twice, and he can feel the consequences of that, see it in the bruises on his chest, the exhaustion lining the faces of his family. He'd woken to a little hand in his, Pop's cheeks damp with tears, and shit, it'd been close. Too close.

A few days after he wakes up, who else should come knocking on his door than Jimmy Turner, lips curved in a shit eating grin, to remind him of their agreement and the shit that's been left in his lap.

_Remember what you owe._

He wouldn't be forgetting anytime soon.

\--

It's a slow process, healing. 

He deals with it. He can bide his time, wait out the process as muscle and sinew reknit, piecing together the holes in his chest and abdomen, a broken constellation of puckered skin that his fingers trace when the bandages come off, a reminder of just how close he’d come to losing it all.

His boys send him the tape from the apartment; he passes along a copy to his lawyer and keeps one for himself. He doesn't watch it, not right away - he doesn’t mean to watch it at all, except for the fact that he can’t forget it’s there, a heavy presence in the corner of the room.

It’s late one night when he finally plays the tape, the hospital quiet and dark around him as he plugs his headphones into the clunky portable tv that one of his boys had dug out of his grandma’s basement for this purpose, a late nineties hold over that was obsolete enough to get laughed through the police cordon without a proper search, VHS tape still loaded in the deck.

Keeping an eye on the patrol cops outside the door, he hunches over the little LED screen and watches the tape - sees Elizabeth wake up, sees himself hand over his gun. Fingers tightening in their grip on the scratchy hospital sheets, he watches as she takes aim and pulls the trigger, again and again.

He watches himself fall, collapsing at the edge of the frame. He does not get up.

When it's over, he's angry, his palms itchy with it, and his fingers twitch towards his gun, towards the solution to all this, except -

Except, it isn't. Not this time.

(He doesn’t trash the screen, although he wants to - but he _does_ destroy the tape, smashing the plastic and flushing the magnetic strip down the toilet.)

\--

Some nights, he dreams of her.

It's both a blessing and a curse.

 _(- lips, tongues and teeth, frantic hands grasping at heated skin, and he's drowning in her, taste, sight and smell_ -

\- _her breath soft against his face as she sighs, her thighs wrapped around his hips, pulling him tighter against her, and he picks up the pace, his hips stuttering as he gets closer, close -_

_\- he snakes a hand between them to rub at her center, swallowing the noises she makes as she clenches around him, as he tips her over the edge. the heat coils in his gut, hot and tight, sparking in his vision when she whispers his name, almost cries it -_

_" - Christopher-!"_

_\- he joins her then, and it's a sweet relief as he collapses against her, burying his face in her hair, in her scent, and it's intoxicating, overwhelming-)_

He wakes with dirty sheets, hot and hard and aching. The bruises on his chest are tender under his heaving breaths, his dreams made all the more vivid by morphine, and he's filled with a brilliant anger and longing, his hands twitchy and violent -

He can’t sleep, after.

\--

It's not long before he's discharged from the hospital and moved to a private clinic on the outskirts of town, somewhere quiet and secluded. He needs to undergo physical therapy, exercise the muscles in his chest, regain some of the mobility he had before although it'll never heal fully, not really.

He still dreams of her.

It’s late one night that he scratches the itch, patching into the feed he'd had set up in her backyard, watching as she stands by the patio doors, a mug of tea held steaming between her hands. 

She's looking out over the garden, and he wonders what she's thinking about. If she still thinks about him like this, in the early hours of the morning, all alone in that big house of hers.

(If she thinks about him at all, it'll be because she thinks he's _dead_. She'd plugged him three times just to be sure, and he's content to let her believe it, for now.)

He watches her until she turns back to go inside, then follows her silhouette through the curtains, the flickering interplay of light and shadow as she gets ready for bed, settling in beside the pathetic excuse for a man she calls her husband.

He thinks of his scars, the memories of his mistakes scored into his skin, the scar tissue that lines his organs. He thinks about how the marks she’s left on him will never fade, not truly, even when the last of his scars have healed, fading into little more than pale marks on his skin.

He’s looking forward to returning the favour.

**Author's Note:**

> Consider this my farewell to the Brio/Good Girls fandom for now! Click on my pseud to find my other brio stories, and thanks for sticking around for the ride. :D
> 
> Come find me on tumblr as ejunkiet!


End file.
